Molina's parents had been Turkish nationals. Although he had been born in Chicago, he considered himself a Turk, and denied, creatively and at length, the sovereign right of the government of the United States to deal with him as a native son. His passport, birth certificate, and driver's license had all been painstakingly, and with infinite trouble, obtained from balky, incomprehending domestic Turkish bureaucracies, through the Turkish Consulate in New York. For all his passion for Turkey, Molina had never once set foot in what he regarded as his beloved homeland.

His father, Ahmet Kundakçı had been an exile. Once belonging to a wealthy family, Molina's father was disowned by his father Baghatur Kundakçı, a wealthy industrialist with connections to the Ottoman arms trade, who could not understand his son's unnatural sexual attraction to large inanimate edifices.

Eventually deported from Istanbul on trumped-up charges, to remove him from the cold gaze of what was left of the Turkish Askeri, Ahmet had drifted for years through pre-war Europe. He'd never stayed long anywhere because of his weird preoccupation with stone outcroppings, mountain ranges, and especially man-made landmarks not necessarily possessing any recognisable architectural commonalities. Once, on a business holiday to the Middle East and India, on which the entire family accompanied Baghatur Kundakçı, the teenaged Ahmet had been so overcome and awestruck by his first sight of the Giza pyramids, that he required days at an costly and exclusive Cairo spa and psychiatric clinic to recover.

He had seemed normal again until the family had arrived in Agra, where the sight of the Taj Mahal apparently had prompted a vehemently-whispered-about, (and vehemently denied) display of automatic, uncontrollable public masturbation. That this had been in front of the daughter of the Turkish ambassador to India had proved to be the final straw that caused Ahmet to be forever cast from the House of Kundakçı. He agreed to a large monthly allowance that would be cut irrevocably if he ever set foot in old Constantinople again.

After this painful episode, Ahmet became an itinerant, tending to prefer the solitude of the countryside and the anonymity it afforded him. It was this that had led him, in the fall of 1940, to accidentally become amoured to a displaced Turkish peasant girl named Nergis, who was living with family friends near Temesh-Vakuf on the Crimean Penisula. Nergis, not unattractive by any known measure, for her part had immediately been taken by the size of Ahmet's erect member the first time she laid eyes on him. He had begun stroking it absently, while standing in awe of a low stone fence. This spontaneously initiated a sort of menage-a-trois-with-still-life involving Ahmet, Nergis and the wall.

The resulting semiformal shotgun union had expressed itself, eventually, as Molina, but not before the wall-struck new lovers had been discovered in flagrante delicto by appalled citizens of a nearby village. The two had been pelted with stones and lumps of dirt hastily dislodged from the wall, to Ahmet's considerable pain, until a passing oxcart, loaded with baled tobacco leaves, had afforded temporary refuge from the hailstorm of stone and verbal abuse. And conveyance to the next settlement, and the next, and beyond that, to the Land Of Opportunity. This all had been secured after the until-then-reluctant driver had bargained away his village loyalty, and his life savings, for a glimpse of the comely Nergis' pubic hair.